Black Dust Background
by Time Traveler 7
Summary: If you are interested in a little bit of background involving my RWBY. This is a short write-up I wrote when I was first creating my RWBY OC. I believe it to be...one of my worst pieces of trash. There are little to no edits. It is written in first person and is super cheesy. I prefer to believe it is not a proper reflection of my work, but perhaps I am in denial.
1. Chapter 1

Black Dust Background

Vale is one of four kingdoms on our planet.

I happen to live here. But I didn't always. I lived in Atlas for the first fifteen years of my life. But then bad things happened to me. And we had to run to the Vale over wilder waters inhabited by all the Grimm who'd love to see our meat in their mouths the light of our souls in their starless chests. But even they are better than people with less heart and soul than Grimm.

Once upon a time I was a warrior, a Huntsman in training. I was ten years into my training. I worked with a Bi-dic Sword. A sort of nunchuk-like weapon which when the two ends are brought together can become a staff and if I pull at one end I can pull a sword out. If I twist the handle right it can become a sniper rifle. Of course that feature has become useless to me.

You see, I used to play a stupid little game with my "friends". We would see who could make it to various points in Atlas fastest. It didn't matter what we did, as long as we won. I ran into the streets. I wanted so badly to win. I wanted to take a car so badly. I would win if I had a car, no doubt about it. And that's what happened. There was a car. And there was me. We were both in the road.

I panicked. I put my aura up.

Suddenly my world disappeared. Everything went dark…and then the darkness disappeared. Which was far worse because I was still very much conscious of my surroundings.

What I heard was awful. I heard the cacophony of the screams of people who had watched the crash. I heard the roar of flames and the beat of my heart. I heard the sounds of the city. I heard people's hearts. I heard people's voices. I heard everything happening that was happening within a city block. It was then I discovered my semblance. I did not hear these things, but no other word describes what I sensed. What I heard was Quanta: every subatomic particle interacting with every other subatomic particle within a block of me. And their song was not a song of individual voices, but of deep cosmic melodies and a million voices speaking as one, holographic in its perfection, a single bit encompassing the whole of its ethereal, eldritch beauty. The waves flowed up and down as Quanta existed, ceased to exist and exited my "field of vision".

Their euphoric, cacophonous song carried me beyond the screams of renaissance and into the throws of dreamless sleep.

I'd rather not talk about that right now. Perhaps later.

It is not just that I can sense Quanta, but I can control it too. Anything I touch I am able to will the atoms to entangle with my own. Using this aspect of quantum physics I am somehow able to control any object I so choose to touch and entangle. I can teleport it. Move it. Dissolve it. Change it. Make it appear in two places at once. Replicate it. And sometimes feel it from hundreds and hundreds of miles away.

Of course there are limitations to this. One being: I am unable to teleport living things as to do so would require I leave every atom in the exact same place and state of energy as it was before it was in Place A. I cannot control the placement of individual subatomic particles, only groups of them. This is a small problem as I am sure that no one wants cancer, and that is best case scenario. Worst case is that I accidentally A: scatter your remains throughout the universe or B: make you feel like your atoms have been scattered throughout the universe. Fortunately I have never attempted to teleport myself. Two being: It must make contact with my skin in order for it to entangle. Three being: All atoms chemically bonded to all other atoms within the object touched are automatically entangled, any that are not bonded are not entangled. So for example, if I were to touch a single, contiguous, four mile wide rock every atom would be entangled. But if that rock were to suddenly become disentangled, pulverized to sand and I were to touch the grains of sand, only those grains of sand I have touched would become entangled. This makes it so that I can only control the parts of people I touch: the skin being the usual area. Four being: the maximum mass of atoms I am able to entangle with is thirteen point seven times my mass (so the total amount of mass I can entangle is around 1305 kilograms). I don't know why it's thirteen point seven, it just is. So that four mile rock would be impossible, I might be able to do part of it, which is all I need really. Five being: I have to be careful not to materialize objects inside other objects or else things explode. Two objects cannot be in one place at the same time or bad shit happens. Six being: It takes tremendous concentration to use an annoying portion of what my semblance has to offer, like that teleportation bid, and the transmutation gig. Seven being: mass, distance and time being variables, moving objects with my mind is taxing mentally, physically and emotionally. I grow irritable, depressed or listless very fast, I get tired very fast, and my general intellect suffers even after I use my semblance in a fight. Using it as my eyes is the easiest part, it only uses as much energy as any other sense organ and a brain. But using it in battle, as an arm or a leg takes stamina. Initially I'll be fine, but oveEerietended usage for more than, say five minutes will cause me some issues. So I limit my usage to pushing people's limbs slightly out of my way, changing the trajectory of their weapons ever so slightly. Sometimes, if I'm feeling high that day, I might use it to jump higher, punch faster and harder and maybe confuse them with an illusion/delusion for a little bit, perhaps even lift objects and use them as shields or weapons. Of course if I do that I run the risk of falling unconscious and killing whoever annoys me next. In a sense I guess I'm bipolar. My semblance works best when I'm manic, but after I use it I'm depressive.

Beacon is a school for those who are good at fighting. It is a school for those who wish to become a Hunter. It is a school where you learn history, language arts, science, technology, psychology, art etc. In this sense it is like every other boarding school in existence. But unlike most other boarding schools it is where you must learn to fight and fight well. It is not a school for the physically handicapped in any respect.

In Beacon we are separated into teams of four determined first by whoever we make eye contact with in a morally dubious exercise involving being catapulted into a Grimm infested ecosphere, and then some unknown random process. Each team has a name determined by the initials of the first name of every team member. My team is PSTL, called "Pastel". We are Pan, Saun, myself—Tene Breuse—and Lune.

I have no fucking clue how I made it onto any team. I cannot be placed onto any team because I cannot be paired with anyone because I cannot make eye contact because I am blind. But that's how it happened. I "saw" Lune first. I guess it was easy for her to find me because of her precognition, but she says she wasn't using it at the time. I'm calling bullshit on that one. She must have been using it. There's a lot more about her than meets the eye. She knows a lot more than she lets on. She's a lot smarter than she lets on. I think she sees more in dreams than in waking, though.

Which reminds me. Our team.

PSTL—Pan, Saun, Tene (me) and Lune.

Pan is a quiet guy, his hair is chestnut brown, his skin is always tan and he loves to wear brown, green and yellow clothes. He's our leader and an excellent strategist. He knows our strengths and weaknesses and directs when we don't know where are supposed to be. Sometimes his abilities to know the outcome of a battle depending on what is done is eerily similar to Lune's precognitive ability, but he rarely asks Lune anything knowing that her ability is specific to her and that she is like any oracle, mysterious and creepy when asked for a prophecy. His semblance is Weather Control, but he utilizes it in strange ways. Rarely does he ever use blunt force, but instead he piles an increasing number of environmental factors against opponents until they are bound to fail due to a cascade of forces against them. For example, one time in the Red Woods, Pan lowered the temperature of the air, a fog rose up from a nearby stream, the limbs of trees began to crackle, the syrup trapped inside freezing. As the fight continued he progressively lowered the temperature, a light breeze began to blow over the tree tops. The clatter of gun fire and melee blows echoed through the forest. Suddenly, as if inexplicably, the side of a tree exploded, fragments of frozen syrup and bark flew into Gurt's face and he was knocked back by Pan. Looking at this whole situation one could see all of this was unnecessary. Pan could have just as blown branches into Gurt's face, or created a great draft of wind and knocked Gurt over, but Pan likes to show off and test his abilities. He uses Dual Sickle Pistols in battle.

Saun, she, well. She can sing. Her voice is lovely as moonlight and sometimes as awe inspiring. But that is because of her ability. She utilizes infrasound, sound beneath the normal range of human hearing, to vibrate objects. That's her semblance. Walking down the street no one would notice the slim, grey-eyed, greyish-brown haired girl in the dark-toned outfit to be able to sing as beautifully as she does, or even expect that she could be changing your own perception of reality by vibrating your eyes and brain. She can open door locks with ease, create local earthquakes, produce shockwaves that break windows, she can even levitate objects with sound. And in her more sadistic moments utilizes infrasound to make animals run in circles. I sometimes thinks she plays with sound and animals like we play with cats and laser pointers, only in this case she is using a method of limited mind control to make them run in circles without giving them a choice to. I don't think she can do it to people, though, or at least I hope she can't. What she can do is produce sound that can disturb you, make you sick or nauseous, make you feel pain in your joints and give you a headache. Her and Pan are never a good team, and by that I mean they are pure evil together, utilizing their abilities to trick people on the street. Thank God they aren't criminals. She uses gauntlets as her weapon.

Then there is Lune. She and Saun are cousins, they both have the same grey eyes and pale skin, but Lune's borders on albino, and her hair is as white as, well, the Moon. She is small of figure and not as heavily muscled as most of us, but she has a sort of unseen strength and is very dexterous. This is a gift, because she does not use her own personal strength, but the strengths of others against them, in battle and in life. She has a precognitive ability which allows her to see possible futures. In battle she'll use it to look ahead fractions of seconds to see her opponent's next move, and using her dexterity she will account for these most likely next moves. Ninety nine percent of the time this technique works, the other one percent can result in her defeat or some minor bruising. But it awes everyone around her who sees when she ducks a blow before it is thrown and takes a slam at them with her hammer. Usually fights with her lasts less than half a minute because she takes down her opponents with precision.

In life, she does the same thing. Usually meek and quiet, she lets the world go by, but when someone does something she doesn't like she will find some way to get back at them. It's happened plenty of times with her, Saun and Pan. Whatever the situation, she will look ahead to the possible futures and find ways to manipulate the reality to punish Saun and/or Pan. Frankly, she scares me a little, but I think that's what she intends. She has that air of mystery about her that all oracles of legend have. I think she just lets the world go by because she already kind of knows what's going to happen, like she's already seen it before and proved it is inconsequential to her reality.

And then, there is Ambedo, the creature of the moment. It is our team attack, and in many ways what we create is as eerie and mysterious as anything any of us have ever experienced. Once upon a time I learned I could entangle myself to other people and that when I did this we had a sort of psychic link and after a few minutes of this psychic link our identities would begin to blur. This is what we do in our team attack. I entangle our souls, our auras, and we release control to whatever we become. The body of this creature is usually Lune, but it is not Lune, it is whoever we become, the Ambedo, the Opia. Lune calls her Cassandra, and the attacks she performs are her Rage. Cassandra's Rage is our team attack. Our souls are intertwined, and Cassandra is the sum of our parts. Cassandra utilizes the body of Lune to go out and use our semblances as a seamless whole. Usually, this brings such alarming devastation to the battlefield that when we are disentangled we can hardly recognize it. I don't remember much from these moments, only flashes come to me, and I dream of what Cassandra has done. I know that the thing we create in Opia, as I like the call it, is some fifth element to our team, some other being, a creature of the light. I feel it is the opposite of grimm. But it is no less scary. In fact, it is scarier than the grimm. Sometimes I wonder if what would happen if we never disentangled, would our identities keep on merging, our brains becoming one, until Cassandra was all that was left of us? What are the long term effects of this entangling and disentangling of souls? How does this change us? I don't know.

For now all we can do is learn and become huntsmen and huntresses. Perhaps someday these questions will be answered.


	2. Chapter 2

From the perspective of the author.

When I first started to write _Black Dust_ I intended for it to be a story with multiple villains. Tene Breuxe was supposed to take center stage. The villain was a man named Nymm Breuxe, a distant relative of Tene's with the same semblance. His semblance was slightly different, though, in that he was essentially an aural vampire and he could copy semblances, but essentially their semblances worked by the same function: control over quantum fields. It was just that Tene had learned to control his one way and Nymm the other. Then I learned that semblances cannot be copied and aura cannot be manipulated. This threw a wrench into my plan.

I underwent a half year long revision process where I decided on a new back story for each of the characters. I even wrote a new reason for how Tene got his power. I will include it in the next chapter of this Background. But understand that part of this will become canon in the main story. Grimm have featured prominently in Tene's life. I always intended for them to destroy his home, his family and eventually a part of him. One of the reasons _RWBY_ so thoroughly enthralled my mind was because of the Grimm. They are an entire kingdom of life (are they alive?) that exists solely to attack humans and keep them at bay. And they seem to be extraordinarily efficient at it, seeing as civilization can only really rise where natural defenses allowed people to thrive. I like to think this is what enthralled Monty Oum for the ten years he slowly developed _RWBY_ (if my memory serves me correctly).

Since this is what enthralls me with the show my stories focus partly on the people who suffer outside the walls of civilizing environs. This is why none of PSTL grew up inside Vale. Tene grew up in a farming village outside Atlas. Saun and Lune were a part of, what I can only describe, as Roma who decided to settle down in a place of isolation from Grimm. And Pan hails from a wealthy governing family in Mistral. And in successive chapters I want to focus on the cultures of each character, particularly Lune and Saun because they are from outside the Four Kingdoms whereas Tene and Pan are still from inside them.

This focus is also why I wrote about the cave art and the visions of Lune about them in the first chapter. I wondered how ancient humans avoided Grimm. And the only answer I have is if they eased their minds, settled in areas where Grimm have trouble reaching and where they could easily kill Grimm. That's why the inhabitants who drew those committed human sacrifice, to ease their minds, why they were close to a source of Dust, making it easier to kill Grimm, and they settled in a place where Grimm have difficulty repopulating: Vale.

I did not intended for these people to be the ancestors of the people of Vale. In fact, I have the opposite in mind. These people were massacred by the tribes who became the ancestors of the people of Vale. Naturally, there was an influx of Grimm from the panic, but the tribes easily defended the Vale. Not only this, but I think the tribes there stayed in Vale because of the Dust. Perhaps this was why they killed the original inhabitants.

The story behind these inhabitants is important in my mind because it is how the kingdoms came to be. The stock of people who entered these places are the ones who made it what it was in the future. Their beliefs, their habits, their technology and their motivation to protect each advanced them further and further until they were even more advanced than us.

On a slightly separate note. The tribes and peoples of pre-Kingdoms Remnant each spoke separate languages. This is why language features prominently in my stories. Old Ninulen is one such language. Another language is Old Mantelese, which Tene speaks a dialect of. Pan speaks a few as yet unnamed languages, but as Old Ninulen is inspired by French, Latin, Urdu and Finnish, and Mantelese is inspired by German and Old English, Pan's will be inspired by Asiatic languages. I will probably write the basics of phonology and grammar on each language in future posts.

The language aspect of Remnant is what leads me to believe that the Kingdoms speak an ancient Lingua Franca, and not English. I have no idea what this Lingua Franca might be, perhaps it is an Auxilary Language, perhaps it is Atlesian, or Vitalese, since that seems to be where their peace treaty was made. But when I watch RWBY I like to imagine they are actually speaking in a language that survived the millennia of Grimm attacks, since in such a world where villages and tribes disappear overnight, entire language families and isolates disappear in moments, and the languages that are left over have survived these attacks, and the speakers of these languages are left to cultivate their languages as they see fit. It's beautiful.


End file.
